Producers, suppliers, and consumers of electrical power rely on energy meters to monitor power consumption and quality for numerous purposes, including billing, revenue, distribution, and process management. Traditionally, the primary means of measuring power consumption was an electro-mechanical power meter, while a number of other types of meters and equipment measured other parameters of power generation, distribution, usage, and quality. As technology has improved, intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), such as digital power and energy meters, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), electronically-controlled Remote Terminal Units (RTUs), protective relays, fault recorders, and the like, have slowly replaced their electro-mechanical and analog counterparts.
The shift to IEDs from analog and electro-mechanical devices provides a vast array of advantages including improvements in measurement accuracy (e.g., voltage, current, power consumption, power quality, etc.) and system control (e.g., allowing a meter to trip a relay or circuit breaker). However, as a result of the increased sensitivity brought about by recent advances in technology and, in general, the shift to electronic meters from their analog counterparts, measurement accuracy tends to suffer as a result of low-amplitude and/or high-frequency noise on the signals measured.